Neil @bpeel@mastodon.social

J’ai fait un plat pour ma copine et elle m’a appris un nouveau mot : fade. J’espère que c’est un compliment 😬 🤞

@savanni That’s the great thing about working in open source. Every contribution you make is publicly visible as an individual :)

Apparently, according to Drops, in Arabic a coconut is an “Indian walnut” and a peanut is a “Sudanese bean”. Fun!

9-day streak so far, and I picked up the Assimil book again and started doing Drops. The encouragement from Duolingo seems to be working so far. The actual course is pretty weird though, but maybe backed up with the book I might make some progress.

Quelqu’un a fait un robot pour jouer à Complot en français sur Telegram https://t.me/complotjeu

The Arabic course on Duolingo is finally available in beta. Yay!

To be honest I’m not really a big fan of Duolingo’s method but so far my attempts to learn Arabic haven’t lasted so maybe Duolingo will be enough to motivate me to do a little every day.

@MartinShadok I guess it’s all swings and roundabouts though because I do have to look up spellings a lot in English. Hm.

@MartinShadok Yup, I just found it surprising because I can’t imagine having to look up any conjugations if I ever wanted to write a story in my native language. It seems like French has gone very wrong somewhere :p

A native French speaking friend next to me is trying to write a story and is having to look up the conjugations for the passé simple. French is an absurd language.

The next level of rage is if you are running screen and you accidentally press <screenkey> S. Then it locks the screen terminal instead of the outer terminal and confused chaos ensues.

@MartinShadok I accidentally do this several times per day. I think it’s because bash has Ctrl-R to do a reverse search like in Emacs, so my brain thinks that Ctrl-S should also work to do a forward search like in Emacs.

@MartinShadok I think it’s meant to be scroll lock. I guess it comes from an era when terminals were slow and you could pause the output to look at something in the middle of a long output. The secret key to unlock it is Ctrl+Q.

I wonder what percentage of times when people press Ctrl-S they actually intentionally wanted to lock the terminal rather then hitting the wrong key and getting into a confused rage when the terminally inexplicably hangs.

Surely we should just remove this anti-feature by now?

“Once you know the female history of computer development, you can’t unsee the giant cock-and-balls scribbled all over it” 😂

https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/29/mentrification-how-men-appropriated-computers-beer-and-the-beatles?__twitter_impression=true

It’s very annoying that Gnome doesn’t have a way to not hide the wifi password when you’re typing it in. 99% of the time you are just copying the password from somewhere else that’s already visible to everyone who could see your screen. Sometimes it’s really long and hard I have to make several attempts to type it correctly.